Westworld Season 2 Finale Review: "The Passenger"

This review contains spoilers for the Westworld Season 2 finale, "The Passenger." Check out the video above as we try (perhaps unsuccessfully) to explain the ending.

However you felt about Westworld's Season 1 finale and how predictable it may or may not have been (depending on how far down the Reddit rabbit hole you fell over the course of last season), it was clear that showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy had carefully laid out the breadcrumbs to explain every reveal, making sure that the show always adhered to its own internal logic.

I have no doubt that Season 2 was just as meticulously plotted, but this season's insistence on maintaining a nonlinear narrative - plus several more dueling timelines - resulted in a story that seemed unnecessarily complicated, if not purposefully incomprehensible, in places - and that was especially true of "The Passenger."

It's entirely possible that you're a much brighter crayon than I am and followed all of the finale's various twists, turns and double-crosses without once developing a headache, and if so, more power to you; but between the post-credits stinger that seemed to confirm the fan theory that William is indeed a host (despite the fact that he was digging a lot deeper into his bloody arm than Bernard ever had to, seemingly without finding anything) plus the timey-wimey nonsense with Bernard and Ford (and with Bernard and Hale-Dolores) this didn't seem like an episode that necessarily wanted you to follow along, so much as to marvel at how clever the showrunners were for tying it all together, even if you didn't completely understand how the magic trick was pulled off.

I was willing to forgive most of the finale's indulgences and misdirects right up until that post-credits scene, because there were moments of genuine emotion buried beneath the exposition: Logan's heartbreaking final conversation with his father; Lee Sizemore's heroic last stand; Maeve's wrenching decision to let her daughter go; Akecheta's long-awaited reunion with his wife; Teddy's baleful expression as he stood alone in the Valley Beyond - when Westworld focuses on exploring its characters rather than outsmarting its viewers, it's one of the most effective and affecting shows on TV - episode 8 standing as a prime example.

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Rodrigo Santoro in Westworld's "The Passenger" Episode

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Rodrigo Santoro in Westworld's "The Passenger" Episode

Westworld: "The Passenger" Photos

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But when exactly did William go down into the bowels of the Forge, considering it was presumably in the process of flooding when he got into the elevator? We heard the distant gunshots from Hector and the other hosts when William woke up alone after the gun backfired, and we were certainly supposed to assume those were the same red emergency lights flashing in the elevator as the ones in the Forge with Dolores and Bernard as William traveled downwards, and yet the place clearly wasn't flooded when he met the host version of Emily - instead there was sand and debris, as if the water had long since dried up.

"Emily" also assured him that he wasn't in a simulation, and that the system was "long gone," which would imply it had been far longer than just a few days - perhaps even years. And yet we saw William on the beach as Dolores was escaping in Hale's body, a "high value survivor" ready to be extracted, meaning that he couldn't have been stuck wandering the park for years after the Forge was destroyed.

Obviously the fact that Bernard and William didn't run into each other in the elevator implies that there's yet more timeline trickery at work (Editor's Note:For a full explainer on the post-credits scene and William's host status, click here), but at this point, it feels needlessly exhausting rather than curiosity-inducing. While the show wears its gaming influences proudly, we shouldn't need a full walkthrough guide to understand the mechanics at work here - obfuscation isn't the same as elegant plotting, and it's hard to summon up much enthusiasm for William's continuing existential crisis if it's going to stretch into a third season and beyond.

The silver lining of all this complexity is that Dolores and Bernard are now out in the real world, which means that the hosts and the audience are now free from the limitations of the park, setting up all kinds of tantalizing possibilities for Season 3. The show is definitely leaning hard into the Magneto vs. Professor Xavier parallels between Dolores and Bernard - Dolores basically promised that the two will be locked in an epic battle of wills over the fate of human- and host-kind until it kills one or both of them, and that's a juicy proposition.

Will the show morph into some kind of corporate espionage thriller, with Dolores using Hale (and perhaps other recognizable bodies) to destabilize Delos and the rest of man's world from the inside? Will she become some kind of terrorist, weaponizing host bodies to create panic among humans? Are there perhaps hosts already out in the real world that Ford planted as sleeper agents before he died, who could join Dolores' cause once activated?

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While "The Passenger" had its share of frustrations, it's certainly a bold move to kill off most of your main cast and dismantle the framework of the show after only two seasons, but there's certainly plenty of narrative real estate to explore in the real world. Plus, thanks to Felix and Sylvester being asked to "salvage" the less damaged hosts, there's no reason to think we're losing Thandie Newton - or even Rodrigo Santoro or Ingrid Bolsø Berdal - in Season 3.

So with that, we close the short, frustrating, but occasionally genius book on Westworld Season 3 - once again we have more questions than answers, but here are a few lingering observations that definitely made us go WTF?

Is Stubbs a host?

This was another popular fan theory throughout the season, and while the long-suffering head of security certainly gives enough hints that he could be a host - the fact that Ford personally hired him "so many years ago I can barely remember it," and that he has a "core drive" and a "role" that Ford gave him - I kind of like the idea that he's just an intensely loyal hire who saw through Delos' BS and wanted to be Ford's eyes and ears without needing to be programmed. The jury's still out?

Which hosts were on the pearls that Dolores smuggled out of the park?

The obvious guesses are Bernard, Maeve, Hector and Armistice, along with the "key" that was stored on Abernathy's control unit - since the camera lingered on the bodies of the latter three. Did Dolores have time to retrieve their pearls while the beach was crawling with security? Hard to tell, but who else would the audience care enough about? We should probably expect a Season 3 twist to subvert our expectations there.

Who was in "Hale's" body with Dolores out in the real world?

Maeve would seem like a no-brainer (she was certainly holding that gun pretty confidently at the end), or maybe Dolores somehow copied her consciousness into her new body and also left it in Hale's, so we get two for the price of one? Evan Rachel Wood and Tessa Thompson make an exceedingly dynamic duo, so fingers crossed it's the latter, and that they can also succeed in rescuing Maeve from Delos once she's patched up.

Will we ever see Teddy or Akecheta again?

This one actually seems pretty definitive - Dolores noted that she would use Delos' satellites to hide all the hosts that went to the Valley Beyond somewhere where no one would ever find them - "no coming back now, no passage between their world and ours." Sadly, that means that we're unlikely to see Teddy, Akecheta or anyone else who crossed over again, aside from via flashbacks. That's definitely a happy ending for Akecheta and his wife, but a real bummer for Teddy, who kind of seems like he's doomed to love Dolores from afar for the rest of eternity. Yikes.

The Verdict

Season 2 of Westworld was at its best when it prioritized the journeys of the hosts instead of baiting the audience, and while "The Passenger" had moments of undisputed brilliance and poetry, much of the emotional impact was blunted by the needlessly convoluted timeline and its desire to shock us with twists.

The "Mystery Box" method of storytelling had diminishing returns even for Lost, which arguably kicked off that trend, so if Westworld wants to evolve in Season 3, it would benefit from a little less emphasis on narrative gymnastics and a little more confidence in its talented roster of performers, who are more than capable of engaging their audience without all the guesswork.

Good

A needlessly complicated (but still frustratingly intriguing) ending to an uneven season.